International competition is nothing new for University of Texas freshman Kendall Baisden. Last year, as a member of the USA junior track and field squad, she competed in Medellin, Colombia at the Junior Pan American Games. The year before, she was in Barcelona, Spain with Team USA at the IAAF World Junior Championships.

This year, she’ll be stateside with Team USA at the 2014 IAAF World Junior Championships, to be held July 22-27 at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore. Baisden, a Birmingham Detroit Country Day graduate, made her fourth junior national team last weekend by winning the 400-meter dash at the USATF Junior Outdoor Championships held July 5-6 in Eugene, Ore.

The top finishers in each event make the national team. Audrey Belf, who will be a senior at Birmingham Seaholm High School in the fall, was a surprise winner in the women’s 5,000-meter run, and Grant Fisher, one of the nation’s top high school distance runners — he will be a senior at Grand Blanc High School in the fall — placed second in the 1,500-meter run to earn a spot on the squad.

The meet, which served as qualifier for the junior national team, featured the nation’s best track and field athletes under the age of 20 and included some college freshmen.

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Baisden, who also won her semifinal heat, came in at 52.21 seconds to win the 400 finals and join the junior national team again.

“I think that it went pretty well,” she said in a statement on the USATF web site. “This will be my last World Juniors. I really wanted to come out here and be able to make the team and I was happy that I was able to do that.”

Baisden is coming off a standout freshman year for the Longhorns’ track and field team. She placed third in the 400 at the NCAA championships and ran a leg on the winning 4 x 400 relay and the third-place 4 x 100 relay as she earned first team All-American honors.

Belf, who won the Division 1 state title in the 3,200 run in June, clocked a career-best 17:01.25 in the 5,000 as she won by more than 20 seconds over runnerup Anna Peer of the University of Nebraska. At least eight of the top 10 finishers in the race were collegians.

“I was really excited to get first,” said Belf, who is also the defending state cross country champion. “It was my first win on a national scale. I’m disappointed that it’s a little hot ... (but) I love coming out here and competing and being pushed to the highest level possible. I love running against people who have posted better times, it just really helps all of us.”

While Belf was the winner, the IAAF standard for the 5,000 is 16:40, some 20 seconds faster than Belf’s time. Until the USATF makes a decision, Belf is likely not to be on the junior team.

Fisher, one of the promising distance runners of the future — he ran a 4:02.02 mile a few weeks ago in New York — continued to race smartly.

“The race was pretty tactical today,” he said. “(It was a) good thing for me, and the race did get bunched up for bit and I was caught on the rail for a while. A gap opened up and I managed to slip out but if that gap hadn’t formed, there might have been some panicking to try to get out.”

Fisher is a national high school champion in cross country.

About the Author

Marvin Goodwin has written stories and columns for The Oakland Press since 1978, and he covers boxing, cross country, wrestling, track, and feature topics. He lives in Pontiac. Reach the author at marvin.goodwin@oakpress.com
or follow Marvin on Twitter: @MarvinGoodwin.